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10/7/10

What Happens After Everyone Goes To College?

...If it is done right, education provides an opportunity to better navigate the world and one’s own life in a more thoughtful, effective, and fulfilling way. Good education provides the empowered, democratic, entrepreneurial skills of creativity, critical thinking, and adaptation, along with rigorous understanding of academic subjects.

The Reality Problem

So all you need as a ticket to the good life is a four-year college degree? Tell this rosy myth to all the current, rightfully skeptical twenty-something graduates, saddled with tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars of college debt. They are dealing with the so-called “new normal,” waiting for diploma-relevant careers to materialize behind a wall of unemployed or retirement-delaying baby-boomers. This oversupply has caused wages to fall, not increase, compounded by a generational flood of women entering the market as well as an increasing number of minorities.

In the global economy, even fairly high skill jobs like computer programming, x-ray interpretation, graphic design, web design, and accounting, have been outsourced by the millions to countries like India that pay their workers much less. Productivity among American workers has skyrocketed as corporations “downsize” workforces, dumping the extra work on the remaining employees. However, this money has not been shared with workers but rather funneled toward profits. Average wages have remained flat or fallen adjusted for inflation over the last decade. Separation of wealth has skyrocketed. For decades American “growth” and family survival has been fueled not by jobs or education, but by debt. That option is ending.

This is a set-up waiting to happen. As with promises that the housing market will always go up and homeownership is a ticket to riches and a comfortable American Dream (a dream now crashed and turned into a nightmare for many), so too can promising minorities their dream job once they pay their educational dues. Education is not a guarantee or a ticket, especially if you are a first-generation college grad minority without connections. If it is done right, education provides an opportunity to better navigate the world and one’s own life in a more thoughtful, effective, and fulfilling way. Good education provides the empowered, democratic, entrepreneurial skills of creativity, critical thinking, and adaptation, along with rigorous understanding of academic subjects....